All That's Left
by Can'tStopImagining
Summary: On the 6th November 1946 the world ends. Peggy Carter can't help but think that if Steve Rogers were still alive, none of this would have happened. (End of the world AU).
1. Chapter 1

A/N: It can't just be me who is terrified whenever entering a new fandom, right? Anyway, here is my first venture into the world of Marvel, with an end of the world AU featuring our favourite badass, Peggy Carter. I hope I've done her justice. This piece is sort of a 'make of it what you will' when it comes to ships – I am a strong Steggy shipper, but Cartinelli definitely have a real presence in this one, and I guess you can take that as romance or friendship depending on your stance. All I will say is: all they have is each other. Sort of.

Shout out to Cam for being utterly brilliant and getting me back on my feet.

* * *

 _Citizens are being advised to seal all windows and doors, and to ensure that, where possible, bomb shelters are used. If you show any signs of nausea or ill health, it is recommended that you seek medical attention immediately, and are immediately quarantined. When new information is available, we-_

The transmission fizzles to an abrupt ending, just as the lights blow one by one. Hushed voices whisper in increasing tones of panic, but there's still an underlining feeling: we beat the war, we can beat whatever this is, too.

Can't we?

* * *

Brooklyn no longer looks like a city. If you squint, maybe. If you look past the tarpaulins hanging across doorways, the overturned cars, the rubble, the stench of dead flesh... It's difficult to remember what this place was before. It's difficult to imagine the bustle of businessmen, or nervous teenagers going on their first date, wiping sweaty hands on their slacks, and running their fingers through ruffled hair. (She pauses because the image is too clear, and it digs a hole in her chest because it makes her think of _him_ and she knows that's why she can't leave this town, why she keeps ending up back here).

Peggy doesn't think she will ever get used to how bare everything is. How empty the streets are. The only sound comes from her own footsteps (which, honestly, she's been grateful of lately – it makes it easier to tell if she's being followed), the only movement bar her own, the slight flicker of shelters in the wind. She knows she's not alone here, but how many others are left, she does not know.

The auto-mat is the only building that still has hot water, and the bell still chimes half-heartedly when the door spins. She hears the click of a shot gun as she pushes the heavy glass, loud to her heightened senses.

"Oh, English, it's you."

Angie puts the shotgun down behind the remains of what used to be a counter, before it was torn out. Her eyes are no longer a shining sea-foam blue, but dark, hollow. She's aged five years in the last month. Her hair is scooped onto the top of her head and tied in a scarf, the end of the limp curls thick with grease. The bounce in her step is gone, the lightness in her voice replaced with exhaustion. Still, her lips twitch into a smile as her stubby fingers spread out over her dress.

"New frock?" Peggy asks, and she enjoys the way Angie's eyes light up, that tiny peek at the woman who resided here before all of this.

"Cost me half a box of powdered milk. You think it suits me?"

The dress's main appealing quality is the fact that it's _clean_ , "oh, yes – it brings out your eyes."

Angie's smile only falters when she notices the smudges of dried blood on the collar of Peggy's blouse, the dirt caked under her chipped-red finger nails.

"It's not mine," Peggy assures her, following her line of sight, "and I didn't... if that's what you're thinking."

Angie gazes at her a while, and Peggy knows there's so much she wants to say, but they don't talk about these things. They never have, and there's no point in talking about it now. This Angie – the one who keeps a shotgun by her side, and sleeps with one eye open – is such a far stretch from the woman Peggy first met, the woman she spent months lying to. She never once believed Angie to be naïve, and she's adapted to this life a lot better than most, but there are still things they don't discuss.

"You should wash up," Angie finally says.

She nods absently, but her eyes are trained on the gap in the sheets hanging in front of the windows, the movement outside. It's getting dark out, but that doesn't mean that everybody has gone to bed. (for one, that would imply that they _had_ beds). She knows better than to believe that just because it's quiet, it's calm.

Not for the first time, she wonders how things would be different if Steve were here. She blinks the thought away because she knows, rationally, that even Steve couldn't have stopped a virus this strong. That maybe he could have lessened the aftermath, but also maybe he _couldn't_. And besides – he wasn't invincible.

Thinking of Steve makes her think of Howard, and that isn't much better.

She clasps her hands together, focusses on the sound of water as Angie fills the tin bath tub out back, and continues her surveillance. There's an edge of irony in it all. That she's the last one left. That she's watched the rest of her team dissipate into nothingness.

That she, the tea girl, the lunch-orders-lady, the runaround, is still here. That she is still doing what she does best.

"You sure were gone a long time," Angie says, and perhaps Peggy has lost her touch after all, because she doesn't hear her coming, "I began to think you weren't coming back."

Peggy wants to promise that she'll always come back, that she'll never leave her, but she knows it's unrealistic, so she doesn't. The truth is, Peggy thrives off this situation, whether she is willing to admit to it or not. She can't be idle now, no more than she could at war. She refuses to accept that there's nothing she can do. There's still a sense of duty in being Agent Peggy Carter, even in a world where that title means nothing.

If Steve were here, it's what he'd do, too.

She's glad Angie understands her need to do this, even if she doesn't necessarily agree.

"I covered more ground than I thought I would," she says, instead, turning her back to her to keep watch, "but still not enough... I'm afraid I can't stay for long."

"You didn't find... what you were looking for?"

Angie doesn't want details; often her questions remind Peggy of the lines of code she'd used during the war, at the SSR. "I always carry an umbrella". She spends all her time reading between the lines, speaking passages with short sentences or curt shakes of her head. It's so different from before. Angie would sit beside her on the couch, legs tucked under her, and try to get any piece of information she could out of Peggy, groaning and rolling her eyes at the word 'classified', eventually giving up and going to bed, but not after giving her a lecture on how good at keeping secrets she was. It feels like a thousand years ago. The life of espionage doesn't feel so exciting now that it's the only life they know; the novelty has worn off.

"No," Peggy replies, quietly. She knows it's getting more and more unlikely that she will find _anything,_ but that isn't going to stop her from looking, "but I did manage to find a few things we can use."

She slips the leather map case off her body, trying to ignore the way her muscles ache as she does so, and hands it to Angie. Where the heavy strap has been across her shoulder for so long, its cut into her skin. She makes a mental note to find something to bandage it before she sets off again. She begins the process of removing the rest of her clothes, remembering that her primary objective is to get washed up, to clean the dirt from every crevice of her body.

To smell a little less like rotting flesh.

Angie has her back to her, going through the contents of the bag, but even if she wasn't, undressing in front of her is no longer something Peggy even stops to think about. She folds her grimy clothes into a neat pile, as Angie hungrily catalogues all of the new items: two cans of beans; a reasonably sized, if slightly discoloured, potato; a small bag of rice; a can of corned beef; a can of tomato soup; two boxes of matches; a hairbrush.

"Not a bad haul," Angie nods with approval as Peggy slips behind the counter and into the bath, "whadya do, raid someone's bomb shelter?"

Sinking into the lukewarm water of the bath, Peggy closes her eyes, and tries not to think about the places the food had come from, "something like that."

It's only once she lets the water soak over her that she realises just how many bruises and cuts she's acquired over the last few days – not that that's anything new. She inspects a few of the deeper ones, decides they'll heal in time and don't need any attention. The bar of soap gets smaller every time she returns, and now its half the size of her palm. She uses it sparingly, absently wondering how long it will be before the hot water runs out too.

She gets out of the bath to find a clean pile of clothes on the counter. The gentleman's trousers have a row of wobbly stitching across a rip in the knee, and the bottoms have been turned up. Peggy slips into them and is pleased to find they're not a bad size on her, though she has to roll them up further. She pulls a blouse over her head. It's unmistakably hers, but Angie's pounded the stains of blood until they've almost disappeared.

"Oh, Angie, you needn't have-"

She's cut off by a loud bang outside. Suddenly, she's alert, reaching for her hand pistol, just as Angie's fingers grip around a knife. They speak in glances, tiny gestures. Angie moves to the door, stands by the doorframe, pressed flat to the wall. Peggy edges around to the front of the counter, her eye on the gap in the sheeting, her fingers tight on the metal of her gun. She's barefoot, and leaving small puddles of water everywhere she walks, her hair dripping down the back of her blouse, but her whole attention is on outside.

The door begins to turn, and Peggy raises a finger in the air to Angie, cocking her gun, and crouching.

When it opens all the way, Peggy almost forgets how to breathe, and it's only when she realises Angie is staring at her, awaiting a command, that she manages to whisper, "it's okay, Angie. Stand down."


	2. Chapter 2

Peggy had been in the office when the news first broke. Of course, it wasn't _really_ in the SSR's jurisdiction, but they still had a duty to protect, to control the city's mayhem. To try and find some kind of resolution to it all.

The science team were, ironically, the first to fall ill.

She'd been there when Sousa coughed up blood the first time. He'd been whisked straight into isolation, and the rest of the team had spent hours under medical scrutiny, until they were finally released.

Daniel held on for 78 hours. Others didn't fight so hard.

There was no funeral.

By the time it became obvious there was nothing they could do, three more members of the team were in isolation. The roads out of Brooklyn were jammed with cars that didn't move – many of which had sheets draped over them now, whether as a mark of respect, or to shield the eyes of the young passers by – and the airport was abandoned. The busy Brooklyn streets went from disorder and chaos, to bare and empty in a matter of days.

The virus had spread to other cities by then. Other countries, too. But people weren't to have known.

* * *

It takes a moment for Peggy's senses to catch back up with her, but when they do, she moves on autopilot. She notices the dried blood on his top lip, that his skin is grey and translucent, that his eyes are ringed with red. His breath is laboured. His whole body shakes with the effort of moving.

"You have to go," she says, and her voice is so heavy with emotion that she doesn't sound like herself, "please, Howard, you have to go."

"Peg, I couldn't stop looking," he rasps. His eyes stare into nothing, like he's not really seeing her. It's like he's sleep walking; there but still not quite _there_.

"Howard, please..." a sob escapes her throat as she moves cautiously closer to him.

He chokes, sounding like a car backfiring, and blood dribbles from his chin. Peggy motions to Angie to move back. She's covering her nose and mouth with the scarf that previously held her hair, stumbling back against one of the booths, her eyes alive with fear.

Peggy manages to back him into the doorway, and, in one smooth movement, swings him outside the doors. He loses his footing and falls to his knees, but scrambles back up again, and to Peggy's horror, he's himself again: awake, alive, alert. He's banging on the glass, she can hear him calling her name through it. She shakes it off. Her instinct is to survive. The doors' locking mechanism is broken, and Peggy has to think fast to come up with an alternative, her mind racing.

"Help me move that seat. We need to block the door," she tells Angie, and they hurriedly carry what used to be a booth seat across to the doorway, lodging it between the panels until the doors are stuck in a closed position, airtight.

Once the door is safe, Peggy sinks to her knees, the weight of what she's just done hitting her like a knife to the chest.

"Oh god," she whispers, the tears already coming thick and fast. She'd become almost immune to the horrors this world holds, but now she feels like she's going to vomit, and her head's spinning, tears escaping without her permission.

"You know that guy?" Angie says, sitting quietly beside her.

Peggy nods, wiping tears away desperately, "my oldest friend," a lump forms in her throat, "the most _ridiculous_ man but... my oldest friend."

For a long while, she cries, and Angie holds her, and she wonders if it wouldn't be better to just stay like this. Perhaps her need to survive, to be responsible for everybody else, isn't so damn important after all.

She loses everybody anyway.

Peggy inhales sharply, scrubbing her hands over her face, and turning to face Angie, "I promise I won't lose you," she says, quietly, and she's avoided promises because she hates breaking them, but this one she intends to keep.

* * *

They stay in silence, pressed against the wall, for hours.

It's torture: sitting, waiting for him to die. But they don't know the incubation period of this thing, or how long it takes to kill, or anything much about it at all, and it's better to be safe than sorry. At least they can't hear him anymore.

Angie has a way about her that can soothe just about any situation. At first she's quiet, understanding Peggy's need to not talk about this, but after a while they start talking about _before_ and though Peggy's been avoiding thinking about it, she can't help but enjoy Angie's stories. Well, 'enjoy' might not be the right word, but it eases the pain a little. It's been their coping mechanism since the start, since that first night of being trapped in the auto-mat, watching whilst the world outside them burned to nothingness.

"The most killer thing about all of this is that no one'll ever get to see me on stage," Angie says, Peggy leaning against her shoulder, "I mean, I could'a been somethin' before all this, but I feel this has really done wonders for my character work, y'know?"

Peggy laughs, and then can't stop, as she realises how _absurd_ the idea of laughing is, whilst Howard is literally dying outside. She'd feel bad, but a part of her knows this is exactly what he'd have wanted.

"Howard always talked about moving to Los Angeles, opening some kind of motion picture studio," she says, after the laughter dies, "he'd have loved you."

"Ya think?"

Peggy smiles, "oh yes," she looks at the ground and then peers back up at her, noting the bright grin on her face, such a rarity these days; "mind you, I can't promise the type of pictures he'd have been making were the kind you'd want to be in... or the kind _I'd_ want you to be in."

* * *

As the sun goes down, the eerie silence of the street outside becoming too much to bear, Angie dares a glance out through the sheets. She gasps, pulling Peggy over to the window beside her.

"It's snowing!" she whispers excitedly, eyes wide.

It's easy to be excited for a moment, but then reality hits them: if it's snowing, the temperature is going to drop even further, and they've no heating, nothing but a small tank of hot water to keep them warm. Angie subconsciously draws her shawl – a memento from one of Peggy's first trips into the outside – closer around herself. Peggy's glad to have dry socks.

Peggy frowns, staring into the evening sky, and suddenly a flake of snow hits the window, and she realises, to her horror, that it's not snow at all.

She pulls the sheets closed and clears her throat, "we should eat. It's been a long day."

* * *

The supplies that Peggy brought with her are stacked neatly behind the bar, the potato added to the dwindling pile of limp, shrivelled fruit and vegetables, the cans in a pyramid to the other side, along with the rice, two boxes of powdered milk, a small bag of pasta, and a lonely tin of tuna.

They've been using a large metal bucket to create a controlled fire to cook over, burning anything they don't need; empty food packages, old milk crates, ruined clothes, broken pieces of wooden furniture. Angie counts the matches out on the counter, sliding all but one back inside the box and putting it into her apron pocket. She strikes the match first try (she's had a lot of practice), and tosses it into the bucket, flames _whooshing_ to life.

Angie isn't much of a cook. She doesn't really have to be: they eat out of need, not for the taste. She balances a saucepan of water over the bucket, and snips off the bad bits of a pile of mixed vegetables. She chops the potato into quarters. Once the water is boiled, she drops the whole lot in.

"Chef's special," Angie says, grinning over her shoulder at Peggy, whose eyes are back on the gap in the sheets.

Peggy glances at her, her smile only slightly forced. She admires the way Angie can keep smiling, keep cracking jokes, even in times like this. She doesn't know how she would keep going without her.

It's dark outside. It gets darker earlier these days, which makes it difficult to keep track of the time. Peggy's eyes strain to make out shapes, and she exhales, tugging the sheets back into place and pressing her back against the cold wall, her eyes slipping closed. They flash open again merely seconds later, as the image of Howard's pale, deathly glare fills the darkness behind her eyelids.

Angie holds out a bowl of vegetable slop, a moment later, and folds into the seat beside her, propping her own bowl up on her knees.

"Don't eat it all at once," she deadpans, pulling a face as she lifts a spoonful to her face, "God, I hope this tastes better than it looks."

Peggy chuckles, "thank you, darling."

She doesn't mean for the food.

* * *

Peggy falls asleep with her head resting awkwardly on Angie's shoulder. Angie doubts it's any more comfortable for her companion than it is for her, but to Angie's credit, she stays still. She listens to Peggy's breathing, watching the rise and fall of her chest. It's comforting. She isn't alone. They'e in this together. It isn't often that she falls asleep with no warning. When she's here, they take shifts. Everything's scheduled down to the second, like a military operation. She supposes it sort of _is_ a military operation. The exhaustion must have finally got too much for her, and Angie couldn't blame her.

As Peggy shifts next to her, moving to lean against the wall instead, Angie lets out a shallow breath. She can't help but be curious, despite the voice in her head echoing _curiosity killed the cat_. She peels herself away from the wall, pausing only to check on Peggy. She doesn't look peaceful, exactly - she's frowning, even in her sleep - but Angie's glad she's sleeping. She needs it.

She lifts the tarp with hesitation.

She can't make out much. It's dark. The window has a thin covering of… whatever that was that had fallen out of the sky like snow. She squints, trying to see into the darkness, but it's no good.

"I guess it's my shift," Angie whispers, sitting down again beside Peggy. She wraps her shawl around her sleeping friend, snuggles down next to her.

Peggy's heart beating close to her calms her down instantly, and she lets herself concentrate fully on that, on the warmth of Peggy's body. For a moment she can pretend they're somewhere else.

* * *

"Wake up!"

She feels firm hands grasping her shoulders, and wakes immediately. That's new, something she's developed only through necessity. It used to take forever to wake her up. She's a deep sleeper. Now she feels like she's permanently at panic stations, on alert.

"Angie," Peggy's voice again, sharper. She squints up at her, shaking off the last wisps of slumber.

"Shit," she says, a moment later, when she's fully awake, "shit I fell asleep."

Peggy looks anxious, but her face softens momentarily, "it's okay, so did I," she says, turning to the window. Now that Angie's awake, she realises it isn't anxiety. It's concentration.

"Look," she breathes, holding the tarp open just enough for Angie to glance through.

"Shit," she says again. That's new too.


End file.
